How Facebook Page Tagging Can Be Free Advertising

Picture this: You’re walking down the street on the way home from happy hour with the usual crew. You get ready to cross the street and suddenly you notice Madonna walking towards her car service with a few body guards. Instantly, you tense up and then you feel your limbs become noodles and before you know it you are just feet from her. You muster up enough courage to ask for a photo with her. She says yes and immediately after the flash you run home to put it on up on Facebook, naturally. You want everyone to see it- it’s Madonna for goodness sake! You upload the photo, you crop and edit, you write the caption and you post. The rush is over. There is nothing else to do but wait and hope it pops up in everyone’s mini-feed generating juice from only your page. Well ladies and gentlemen- starting today, people can freely tag Pages in their photos on Facebook in the same way they can tag their friends. Why would you want to do this? Because photo tagging for Facebook Pages enables people to share richer stories with their friends on the social space about the things they interact with in the real-world, such as businesses, brands, celebrities, and musicians.

A Facebook Page can fall in any of these buckets: Local Business or Place, Company, Organization, Institution, Brand, Product, Artist, Band, Public Figure, Entertainment, Cause or Community. However, this new tagging feature currently only applies to the categories of Brands & Products and People. In time, more of these Page buckets will be included in this tagging list, but for now only the Apples and Madonnas of the Facebook world can be tagged. As soon as a user tags a Page, it can be seen by anyone who can view a photo in the “photo viewer.” This makes for great brand awareness and opportunities for brand ambassadors to share with their networks- networks that even Madonna herself might not have touched. Although these tagged photos will not show up on the wall of the Page, they will automatically appear on the Photos application. A user does not need to be a fan of the Page to tag them in a photo, as long as they are on Facebook- they can tag away.

How does this apply to your brand? You are just like the Apples and Madonnas of the Facebook world. People who love you want to tell their friends. Those people are the ones who shop at your store, order your products online, dine-in your restaurant or sign up for your services. They can take and tag photos of your brand and generate buzz as fast as you can say “social sharing”. This is the best way for you, the brand, to actually see your brand ambassadors rise to the surface of your Page. Better yet, you can see who your new customers and how they interact with you via photo sharing.

Getting nervous about spam or “inappropriate” photos being tagged as your brand? Do not worry, Page admins can choose to remove tagged photos at any time with any photo. In addition, if you don’t want users tagging your brand in photos at all you can go into the Edit Page options. From here, click Posting Options and un-check “Users can add photos.”

So, maybe you don’t encounter Madonna on the way home from happy hour or even Mark Zuckerberg himself. But maybe, you stop into a Dunkin’ Donuts on the way home realizing you still have work to do that night, and your iced vanilla latte is especially delicious. Snap, save, upload, tag! You walk into your room and pick up those faithful Levi’s Jeans off the floor and think to yourself, “Man, these are my best fitting jeans and I hope they never discontinue this style.” Snap, save, upload, tag! Each of these snaps, uploads and tags result in free advertising. For your brand on Facebook, that means more conversation, more engagement and more connection.